But irony-challenged groups like “Institute for Public Accuracy” and “Forecast the Facts” are never ones to allow reality to intrude on their destructive economic agendas. They remain the Left’s version of Jerry Falwell, who blame the wrath of the storms on humankind’s sins. Just in time for Halloween, they remain ever at the fore to scare us out of our modern lifestyles.

Meanwhile, if it hadn’t already been laid low by the disclosure a few months ago by Keith Briffa of the data that went into his larch thermometry, the good researcher from the Climate Research Unit, perhaps repenting of his own climate sins, seems to have dealt a final death blow to the poor, beleaguered Michael Mann’s hockey stick. What’s worse for the warm mongers, he and his co-author resurrected the Medieval Warm Period. As the indispensable Anthony Watts notes:

Look at graph 5c, and you’ll see 20th century warmth matches peaks either side of the year 1000, and that for the TRW chronology 20th century warmth is less than the spike around 1750. This puts 20th century (up to 2006 actually) warmth in the category of just another blip. There’s no obvious hockey stick, and the MWP returns, though approximately equal to 20th century warmth rather than being warmer.

…I have to wonder if this is some sort of attempt to “come clean” on the issue. Mann must be furious at the timing. There’s no hint of a hockey stick, and no need to splice on the instrumental surface temperature record or play “hide the decline” tricks with this data.

The timing referred to here is Professor Mann’s filing of a defamation law suit last Monday against National Review, Mark Steyn, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Yours Truly, though I am not at liberty to comment further, on advice of counsel. But readers are of course free to speculate on the implications of this for any trial, should it actually occur.

Between this and the aforementioned climate ambulance chasers, one might almost say that this is a perfect storm for them all.

Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.

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38 Comments, 25 Threads

1.
Tcobb

Best wishes to you sir–

I hope you and your attorneys take full advantage of the discovery process to root out the nasty connections to Mr. Mann who are hiding behind the curtains. And you should, I think, file a counter-claim against him so that he cannot shut down the process if he thinks the hounds are getting too close to him or his masters.

Just as a note, be careful with comparing storm deaths over a century or better. Most of the decrease in deaths over the past 50 years has been due to better forecasting and especially weather satellites, which allow us to track hurricanes from formation.

The fraud that is AGW alarmism is exposed by the tautological use of the term, “Climate Change.” The climate is always changing, so to claim there is climate change is never to be wrong. Sorry folks, that’s not science. Also, the fraud that is global warming has been exposed by the climategate e-mails.

In any event, all the alarmist models have been proven to be wrong. They forecast much higher temperatures than there are today. Indeed, temperatures today match the forecast of no change in CO2, but today’s CO2 levels put the modeled temperatures at the high range of the temperature forecasts. Also, Mann’s hockey stick has been shown to be a statistical fake and the MET office (in London) has just come out with a chart showing no global warming since 1997. That is so, despite CO2′s continuing to increase at a steady pace. Question: If CO2 increases causes global warming, why has there been no warming since 1997?

I sometimes think these alarmists have one goal in mind: To make us energy free and dirt poor.

Obviously blaming the severity of this coinciding with the moon & tides would be false, because the moon is so distant from the earth, there’s no way it could affect the storm surge, just as there’s no way that the sun could affect temperatures here on earth. Only cars and coal burning plants, and meat eating, cause global, er, climate change and big storms.

And weather isn’t climate, except when it’s handy to the argument… And Romney sucks. And…

To be completely accurate; it’s not cow farts per se that contribute to bovimorphic global warming. It’s belches. Cows belch quite a lot of methane, a powerful absorber of solar radiation and give off heat. So, while cow farts are a powerful thing, as I’ve myself witnessed in awe, it’s the belches and the volume of methane they release that have the real power to contribute to global climate change. Or not. What no one ever mentions is that the Earth is covered with bacteria that eat methane like little kids eat candy at Halloween.

You think this is funny?http://www.environmentalleader.com/2008/12/03/farmers-against-proposed-cow-tax/
“This summer, the EPA issued an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” that called for public comments on the idea of regulating GHG emissions. The comment period ended last week but before that farmers were lobbying fiercely against a “cow tax” which would tax them for the methane that livestock emit, New York Times Reports.”

Don’t confuse climate prediction with weather prediction. They both use computer modeling, but local weather prediction – especially hurricane predictions – are much more accurate. For one thing, all that the hurricane models care about is the current temperature and pressure in the area, not the long-term historical records.

Climate-blaming here is transparently stupid. Judged by wind speed, Sandy was no stronger than other hurricanes to hit the Northeast such as the Long Island Express in 1938 or Donna in 1960(1? I don’t remember it precisely.). Sandy’s unusually large damage comes from a high, but not outlandishly high intensity for its wind speed (940 mb), resulting in an extraordinarily wide wind field, the fact that it came ashore at high tide (6 hours earlier or later and New York wouldn’t have flooded), and most importantly, the very unusual track caused by the coincidence of a huge cold front crashing into Sandy as it came ashore, causing it to strengthen as a hurricane force post-tropical storm and move directly West rather than East like most hurricanes. None of these effects are caused by global warming, simply by random chance.

Exactly right, Brian! I’m not surprised that AlGore used this tragic storm to try to line his pockets with more carbon credit cash, but the idea that somehow man caused this storm is nonsense. If we can cause it, we can stop it. And we can’t. Naturally, since the storm happened in the heart of Media Central, New York City, the center of the universe, we will hear about it until we can’t stand it anymore. Because EVERYTHING that happens in NYC is more important, more catastrophic, more talked about – because the reporters don’t even have to leave their homes, and BTW, they are the ones being inconvenienced. In the meantime, those of us in flyover country, while we feel for the people along the Eastern Seaboard – especially the ones whose homes BURNED – we will get pretty sick of hearing about it by this weekend.

I watched the coverage before, during and after the storm, and all through it the meteorologists were saying that the storm surge would be the highest since a storm 200 YEARS ago. 200 YEARS!!! But still I knew that AlGore would be out there yammering about global warming. But 200 YEARS ago we didn’t HAVE AGW. So explain THAT storm, Al.

One of the reasons this storm will rack up astronomical damage costs – unlike the storm 200 years ago – is because the areas have allowed so much development in the storm surge/flood zone. I have a news flash for you. If you own a multi-million dollar beach house along the Atlantic Ocean, you better plan that one day it will be destroyed by a hurricane! If you can’t afford that, don’t build a home at the beach. Or build it in the Great Lakes. As for NYC, it’s an ISLAND!!! There’s water all around. This creates a flood hazard. Are these buildings not in a 100-year flood plain? They ought to be. If you build a home or a building in a 100-year flood plain, you better figure it will FLOOD one day. Duh!

That said, I am sorry for those people who are displaced by this storm. I know how hard it is to clean up after a hurricane, because I lived through one in the very un-hurricane likely city of Charlotte, NC in 1989. I remember neighbors pulling together to help each other clean up. I remember not having power for about 10 days. I remember being grateful because we had a gas grill with propane so we could cook all of the food that was defrosting in our freezer without power. And we could make coffee. And we fed our neighbors and they fed us. We cleaned up our own neighborhood then moved on to help neighborhoods around us. We did not wait for the Federal Government to swoop in and make everything right. We did not wait for municipal or state workers to come clear the trees off our street so we could get out. Neighborhood men with their own chain saws went out and cleared the debris before the city could get there. Frankly, Home Depot and Lowes were far more valuable to us than the federal government in the first weeks after the storm.

Amy Goodman was all over it tonight. Seems like the words “Fossil Fuel”, “Climate Change”, “Unprecedented”, “Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures” were flying between her and her guests. Then they had another guy to point out how the nuke plants are going to melt down because the cooling pumps are flooded because the sea level is rising because of the fossil fuel and Republicans.

I would like to see the Goddard graph above normalized for ALL cyclonic energy -Hurricanes, Typhoons, etc. around the globe, instead of just US landfalling storms….

As for me? I’d just like to see the graph correlating atmospheric CO2 with number of pirates. Atmospheric CO2 has remained about the same while the number of pirates has dropped precipitously. Coincidence?

It isn’t much of a mystery: enviros are people who have rejected God, and now, believe in anything. Thus, they have worshipped hope/change Obama, but now he has bled, and he will be thrown under their prius. Whenever I see ‘Climate Change” or “Global Warming”, I just replace the terms with “godling” and move on.

Mainstream environmentalists are “watermelons” i.e. they are “green” on the outside, and red on the inside. Look at any of the rhetoric coming out of the global climate change summits, it’s all just old-school international socialism warmed up for a new century. All the proposed “solutions” are just ways to make the rich countries as poor as possible while transferring the wealth and power to the third world. That’s their real agenda. They couldn’t care less about the environment as long as we’re all poor and equal. The more extreme ones occasionally show their true colors by calling for the deaths of several billion people and the imposition of a tyrannical one world government. Even if climate change was a real threat I’d rather live in their worst case scenario model than the totalitarian “solution” they propose.

First, a lot of sympathy for the people who were unfortunate enough to be in the path of this storm.

Now for the qubbling…

I grew up in eastern NC, and have experienced many a hurricane in almost a half century.

A Cat 1 hurricane doesn’t even cause most Carolinians to break a sweat. New Yorkers can say they’ve experienced a real hurricane when they are stuck in a wood frame house with 140+ mph winds outside, they can feel the entire house vibrating and shaking non-stop for hours, and then finally realize that the roof is on the verge of getting ripped off.

The danger here, and it was/is a danger, is the flooding.

That’s what kills most people when a hurricane blows through. They think they can drive through the flooded water and can’t tell how deep the water is. They think the water isn’t flowing that strong, but water is very heavy and it doesn’t have to be flowing that strongly to shove you off your feet and send you downstream. The flood is going to cause all kinds of creepy crawlies to come out of the underbrush – things like snakes.

Then you have the clean up itself. I’m sure the emergency rooms are already getting ready for the inevitable accidents involving tired people and chainsaws/axes.

Speaking of medical – make sure you have your tetanus shot updated.

Back to the topic though….this ain’t unusual. It ain’t even unheard of for the region that got hit. It just doesn’t happen that often is all.

It isn’t Gaia getting all PMS’y, it isn’t man getting his comeuppance from nature – it’s just flat out sucking luck that this storm made landfall when and where it did. The water in the rivers couldn’t flow out to the sea, the storm shoved ocean water in a huge surge back up the rivers at the same time, and you had the storm dropping rain on top of it all.

Same thing happened to NC during Hurricane Floyd, and a huge chunk of NC ended up flooded just like what’s happening now in the north-east.

This is not a unique event, it’s not only happened before – it’s happened within recent living memory. It just happpened somewhere a little further south than the north-east.

If the climate change bloviators would spend more time helping their fellow citizen and less time trying to apply blame for mother nature doing what mother nature does, we’d all be better off.

While they continue to worship the cult of global warming/climate change, the more religious types they generally denegrate (Christians) will be doing charity drives, filling up 18 wheelers with supplies, and generally doing everything they can to help those who got hammered….

I attended a talk from a reviewer of the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” back in 2009. She opened the talk saying how we shouldn’t extrapolate from short term trends…then proceeded to tell us how everything we (humans) were doing was going to cook the earth to a crisp – based on a model from the last 100 years of the millennium. With no concern that ice core measurements may be smoother than actual temps back in the day and that improvements in modern day measurements are responsible for the variation. Or that their model of a world without humans just might have some error in the parameter estimates. The thought that variation in temps may not be that different from ancient times never crossed their minds.

Remember, according to them, those cold winter temps a couple years ago were just “weather”, but this hurricane is proof of global warming.

The Eco-fascists are readying their next move now. There is a UN Conference on Climate Change set to convene in Doha, Qatar, on 26 Nov. It will run through 7 Dec. President Obama will select, or has already selected, the US delegation. Since it is after the US election, the delegation will probably not be acting in the best interests of the US because either 1) Obama won and they will be pushing for the green agenda he wants to impose on us, or 2) Obama lost and they will work to constrain President Romney as much as they can. The purpose of this conference is to get a new anti-global warming protocol put into effect to accomplish what the Kyoto Protocol failed to do, bind the US and other first world countries to constrain energy use and transfer large amounts of wealth to poor nations (or UN big-wigs, whichever comes first). President Obama can then issue Executive Orders based on that new UN protocol that, if elected, President Romney may not be able to easily overturn. In those situations, the eco-facists will be positioned to fight in court attempts by President Romney to take those actions. Hopefully, those scientists going to Doha to fight the eco-fascists will be able to prevent that conference from issuing that new protocol.

It doesn’t matter. Those delegates are on a junket. They have no power of any sort. They could agree to turning Florida over to Castro or giving a box of paper clips to North Korea and nothing would happen. The Senate decides on treaties. Period.

Al Gore just joined the fray and said it was “Unprecedented” and due to “global warming pollution.” He’s the first I’ve seen today who used the W-word (Warming) and not the more politically correct C-word (Climate Change).

Great mother Gaia has finally had enough of these crack-pot false profits claiming to know her moods 50 or 100 years hence. So she has unleashed her fury on liberal land to punish the heretics. Hubris brings nemesis. I can only hope the warmists will learn their lesson.

Even in the face of the great storm the climate cultists still imagine that they are gods.

Ch 38

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind. He said:

2 “Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
…
33 Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?

34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and cover yourself with a flood of water?
35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?

There have always been big storms. There have always been hot years and cold years. Ancient Rome was several degrees warmer than it is now. There was a “mini ice-age” in medieval times. I have seen at least two articles lately that state that the warming was over several years ago.

It’s wonderful the way the warming alarmists put things on the shelf and out of public discussion until they think they can get some mileage out of them. We haven’t heard diddly squat about hurricanes and global warming since Katrina back in ’05. That darn weather just wouldn’t cooperate and give us big storms to do lots of damage in the United States.

But now we got ourselves a big storm and we can blow the dust off all our ridiculous predictations from 2005, and we’ll kindly pretend that the hurricane seasons of 2006 through 2011 never existed.

It’s really irritatingly amusing how the AGW crowd based their whole hoax on 25 years of weather (1970 – 1990) and certified it absolute truth after 8 more years of increasing temps. But then 14 subsequent years of flat or declining temps and 7 years of Atlantic hurricane non-activity cannot bring them to reassess their original hypotheses, which have not been corroborated since 1998.

My freshman Engineering professor got her PhD from Penn State. I emailed her my condolences about the Sandusky thing putting a shadow on all of her research and her degree, and said that I hoped Mann would just shut up for a while and focus on his oil from algae (useful enough if it works for any extra-planetary colonies) instead of defending himself on the indefensible, thereby making Penn State look far far worse. While she definitely does not agree with me on AGW, she said that yes, he should shut his pie hole before discovery allows everyone on our side of the AGW debate to actually look at his body of research in its entirety.

I had to do a double take on that one. If his research is solid, then he (and your Prof) should welcome people actually checking his research. If Mann (and your Prof) have a problem with people examining his research, they must think there is something wrong with it.

Clever responses all. Proof positive that there’s nothing to see here, move along. But in the land of short memories, you guys are going to be steamrolled buy recent history, and the Hurricanes, Droughts, Floods are speaking, and it’s time to recall the sage: “Nor all your piety nor wit will persuade [them] to erase but half a line”.